Produced a Fruit

Produced a Fruit

Saturday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time

Piety

You fool! What you sow is not brought to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be but a bare kernel of wheat, perhaps, or of some other kind. 1 Corinthians 15:36-37

And some seed fell on good soil, and when it grew, it produced fruit a hundredfold." After saying this, he called out, "Whoever has ears to hear ought to hear." Luke 8:8

Study

During elementary school, we had a nun who was a quite popular visitor to religious education classes.  She visited one week and told us that the next week, she would return and show us something that had never been seen before and would never be seen again. Needless to say, it left us curious…but we promptly forgot and went about our childish “business” of schooling and sleeping and playing and eating until we returned the following Saturday.  Most of us probably forgot her promise until Sister Mary walked back into our classroom and produced a fruit -- an orange which was in the front pocket of her habit.

She stood in front of the class peeling the orange.  When the fruit was fully exposed, she separated it into sections and held up each section one-by-one. “No one had ever seen this section of the orange before,” she told us. As it disappeared into her smiling mouth, she chewed it up and swallowed explaining “…and no one will ever see it again.”   

That sweet-sour-juicy fruit was nothing like the seed from which it grew. Round, grey, small and hard. But with a little water, a little soil, a little time, and a little fertilizer, the seed become something completely different from its natural start.

I think Sister Mary probably read a lot of Corinthians and Luke and thought about those seeds quite a bit.  Our young minds were never the same after she held up that section of orange and contemplated what it was, what it is, and what it would become.  

And now for something completely different.

Paul and Jesus knew that the farmers of ancient Palestine would probably understand the analogy of the seed better than we do. They relied upon seeds to grow into their food.  A flood or a drought would spell hunger. A dust storm might carry away the seeds planted in the field. Weeds would choke the seeds natural growth.  Rocks would inhibit any growth at all.  Sister Mary might not be able to stand in front of their religious education class every year with her orange or pear or apple or fig or date.

Action

What are we to become?

Hopefully, with a little piety, a little study and a little action, the seeds of our youth will grow into a committed Catholic of a new kind.

Maybe we should not equate religious education with grades of public schooling.  At some point, those classes end.  Some go on to college…or graduate school or professional education.  When school ends, life commences. But our religious education never ends. Confirmation is not graduation. It is a passes from one stage to another.

What have you become? Unless we let our childhood pass away, we never become a teenager.  Unless our teenage years pass, we never become adults. The seeds of a 20-year old adult grow into something different at 40, 50 or 60 years.  What are we to become next? We will never see our youth again.  But we have many ways to cultivate the person we will become tomorrow.